Lisa Hemann addressed commissioners’ concerns about revenues exceeding expenditures and reviewed general proposed numbers for the 2024 budget.
She explained that expenditures exceeding revenues in county fund balances is part of a normal budgeting process. Commissioners allocate excess revenues into certain funds over time to cover items like ongoing maintenance and capital improvement projects.
The commissioners agreed to later allocate a portion of CCITF (County Capital Improvement Funds) for specific purposes such as a parking lot project. Following that, the board will allocate $425K from the CCITF for grant distributions via the CDGF (Commissioner’s Discretionary Grant Fund) pending an application and review process for people to apply for other grants. They highlighted that the Use Tax and Conservation Trust funds are low and agreed not to allocate money out of them towards other budget funding needs during the next budget cycle.
WAGE INCREASES
Commissioners discussed the best ways to resolve ongoing challenges with hiring/retaining employees.
“We’re having a really hard time getting snowplow drivers and on and on and on because the people around us are paying more wages,” said Commissioner Doug Overton
According to a 2022 market evaluation, a number of employees are underpaid based on multiple factors including inflation and increased cost of living. Commissioner Ty Gates noted that competitive wages is a longstanding problem for the county and said they are trying to work towards more equitable pay rates. The process hasn’t been straightforward, however, as the market analysis revealed a variety of issues with the current pay structure.
“We ran into many issues where we had staff based on their unique skill sets and then what we had asked for them that didn’t fit cleanly within the job descriptions,” said Gates. Differences between living on the Front Range versus the Western Slope further complicate the data, according to commissioners. Due to uncertainty about the data and how to apply it toward the budget process, commissioners plan to address higher priority wage discrepancies during the 2024 budget cycle.
Facilities Director Eric Jaquez expressed concern over long-term consistency of wage increases and asked the board what metrics would be used to justify approving or rejecting wage increase requests from the various departments. “We right now don’t have a tool that takes that job description, skill set and knowledge that person is currently holding and gives us the metric which equates to a raise,” he said.
Unlike some other departments, Jaquez had not submitted requests for wage increases based on the assumption that 2024 increases would be across the board for all employees.
Despite the board’s hesitancy to use recent market analysis data, they plan to allocate $350K towards “across-the-board” wage increases, setting aside an additional $50K to be used for specific wage increases following a vetting process that gives each department head equal opportunity to apply for raises outside of the broad percentage based increase.
BY LUCAS TURNER | Special to the Herald
